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Poplus is a global collaboration of groups that believe it is currently too difficult and expensive to build effective new digital tools to help citizens exert power over institutions. Poplus Components are loosely joined tools, mostly structured as web services, that can be used to radically decrease the development time of empowerment sites and apps.

Transcripts are a kind of oil that greases the wheels of well-functioning societies. They let people discover when powerful people have made pronouncements that affect less powerful people. We believe that by making transcripts function better, more people will end up learning about decisions and opinions that affect their lives.

You could convert your data to the right format, and work with us to get it uploaded to an instance here on sayit.mysociety.org. You could log in and author transcripts directly through this web interface, sharing your instance with others to help. Or you could install SayIt on your own server in your own project. More details.

In web development, ‘Beta’ is the name for a release of a piece of software which is in progress. In the case of SayIt, we are launching early so that we can learn more about what features people want us to build, and which are less important.

Online video is definitely amazing stuff. But text transcripts offer certain virtues too, which makes them valuable in different ways. If you want to know whether a committee has been talking about you, or you want to subscribe to be sent alerts when your street gets mentioned by powerful people, then written transcripts, made of nicely structured data, are hard to beat. The ideal system would clearly mix written words, audio and video, and being open source we hope that SayIt can be integrated with other systems that specialise in AV. We’re keen to talk to people running projects in this field.

SayIt is open source, licensed under the Affero GPL, and you can check out the code in our GitHub repo. The data standard we use is a subset of the Akoma Ntoso data standard – a standard developed specifically for use in parliaments and assemblies.

Can I write a parser that loads data directly into SayIt on a daily or weekly basis?
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Yes – we’re keen to see people use the site like this. Please contact us so we can discuss how best to implement this so it works well for you and us.

Yes, you don’t just have to record one event, like a trial or a focus group. You can build up nicely structured database of quotes made by people across media sources, or from books and papers. We would like to see people use SayIt to build sites like ‘all public statements by the Prime Minister’.